braabe

I think it varies. I suspect in most common cases the lack of enforcement results from the rest of society not having an appetite to punish it. No harm done, no need to punish.

I believe jaywalking (or crossing a red light as a pedestrian) is prohibited, but you would have to do it in front of a really motivated cop (or cause an accident) to actually get a ticket for it. It is common and no one really cares - but if you were to do it in front of children or a school you will probably get disapproving looks or a somewhat stern talking to from others around you.

I think the image of the "order-loving german" is a bit of a stereotype. Some people overdo it (Calling the police for noise harassment if you still mow your lawn at 20:01), but they are generally not popular with their neighbors (or the police...)

The AfD candidates were in their late-50s to late 70s, some apparently with serious preexisting conditions, all ruled natural deaths (and one suicide). I have no idea how to substantially proof the absence of a conspiracy but I see no evidence to the contrary. I would, however, be extremly interested in seeing the math from the people claiming this to be "statistically extremely unlikely". It lacked rigor in the past. The thing with unlikely events is, that they tend to happen if your sample size is large enough. :D

Nitpick: Second most popular (looking at the federal elections from this year). And I think they have no realistic chance to govern any time soon, as no one from the other parties (the other 75% of the vote!) wants to form a government with them. There is this joke, about the left splitting their vote share over too many small splinter parties: The biggest enemy of a rightist (?) is the leftist - the biggest enemy of the leftist is another leftist who holds 98% of the same beliefs!

I am confident, that I could call our current chancellor every insult under the sun and not be prosecuted for it. (I am aware of the incident with Andy Grote, which has since been ruled unlawful and unreasonable. I would assess this more as a case of improper use of influence / corruption than systemic prosecution). Conversly, were I to call for his murder, I think prosecution would very much be reasonable. Escalation to violence has, in my opionion, no place in the political process. You are welcome to disagree.

I (honestly!) hope your institutions are up to the task of defending that first amendment. I increasingly get the feeling, that a constitution is of little use, if no one in power is willing to stand up for it.

I have had this experience, but not with healthcare insurers (in Germany). I cannot remember the last time I had to contact them - the last two times they contacted me, was to explain to me, that they have expanded their preventive care offerings and they recommend I go and get them.

Blanket rejections are an extremly efficient measure from the perspective of an entity when the consumer has nowhere else to go and you don't care about ethics. Just tell them no and many people will just give up. If they appeal, you can invest the work to fob them off properly or just pay and not deal with the hassle. I can barely tell the difference with the many public healthcare insurers in germany - if my insurer were to try this nonsense, I would be gone the next month. Universities, some agencies and especially the god-damned GEZ on the other hand...

What frustrates me more, is that it often turns into a class indicator: Do you know how to word your letters or to handle yourself in a way that indicates, that it will be more annoying to not-deal-with-you than to deal-with-you? And if you don't: Do you have a access (network/money) to someone who does?

All of these examples are probably in part or fully paid for with some sort of taxes. So it is less "no payments" and more "deferred payments".

I would argue that the question of "Is it free?" should not be restricted to monetary payments. If I offer you dinner for an hour of yardwork - are you receiving the food for free? If I would offer you that same dinner in exchange for letting me watch you use your computer for a while, is it free?

I think ads do incur a cost on you: In usability of a service, in your attention span / desensitization and your ability to focus, in the money you would not have spent were it not for ads.

Googles services are free in the sense, that you don't spend cold hard cash on them, but I would still argue, that you pay for them. That 2 Trillion Dollar valuation has to come from somewhere... :(

The 6th largest Software-Provider in the World (SAP) is probably the most notable global german software firm. Deutsche Telekom, maybe. As far as I am aware, there are some bigger gaming companies as well. But this is, of course, a singular counterexample.

Germany has a large "Mittelstand", so medium sized companies and much stronger antitrust/cartell-laws. One could argue, that the lack of extremly large tech-companies is, for better or worse, by design.

Wirecard was a disaster for a multitude of reasons: The company itself [lost|stole|defrauded] a billion euros, their auditors (Ernst&Young, now "EY") failed to notice a billion euros of irregularities and lost their auditing license over the debacle. The german banking authorities failed in some capacity I cannot remember right now.

I have a similar story to this: Learnt Delphi (Lazarus) in school, got put on a Delphi project on my first job because I was the only one to "know" the language. The application only had maybe 100k lines of code, but had been started around 1984 (in Pascal, I imagine) and had expanded ever since. I only took over because the previous (only) developer had just retired.

I got hired for my second job, because of my previous experience with Delphi. It was a cool job with amazing colleagues, but I have opted to go for a degree in Computer science and I am not going back to Delphi.

There were many small frustrations with the language. I have recently worked a lot with GoLang and Python and have come to appreciate the extensive (standard)libraries these language provide. I know how to manage memory or reverse/traverse some iterable by hand - but do I have to? I feel like my time is spent much better by thinking about architecture, maintainability, testing, actually solving problems than wrestling with tasks, that computers can do much better by now.

I agree on this, but I believe the comment was aimed more at the "Tinker-Attitude" that many STEM-People have. And I believe many other professions have this to an extend: I'd imagine that many journalists and authors enjoy reading in their spare time. Every mechanic I know has a cellar full of half-finished machines he fiddles with in the evening.

I don't have the energy to code on private projects for eight hours after eight hours of coding at work (besides occasionally enjoying not sitting in front of a monitor...). But every once in a while it bites me to blow 10 hours of tinkering on some strange useless problem, like simulating Logic-Gates with basic arithmetic.

I think it is really, really hard to get the scope of a no-code or low-code platform right. If your scope is too narrow, your users will hit a wall where they cannot implement the feature they want ("I like the default search-feature, but I want my results sorted by length, not by date - sadly there is no option for that...") and if your scope is too big or too customizable, you need to be a programmer to understand/use it and might as well use [Your-favorite-language]. Joel Spolsky's "Leaky abstractions" (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...) fit that problem nicely. And I have no solution to offer for that...

My problem with smartphones in that context is that (at least for me) it is very difficult do efficiently interface with them. You have rather limited space to display information ("Code-Blocks", your Program-Flow, Debug-Info, Output) or to input information (only two thumbs/drag-and-drop instead of all my beloved keyboard shortcuts). So I agree: To make that viable, there has to be a rather big paradigm shift, either in the way we interface with our machines or in the way we write programs.

I wholeheartedly agree. It feels a bit like a debate about speed limits: "I'm really only a couple kph/mph over it. The speed limit here is stupid anyway."

I am however glad this issue came up. The author does not appear to want to screw anyone over legally on this - so why not take it as a lesson learned and go from there?

Some suggestions: - Try finding a sport you can perform together with others. For me this was climbing/bouldering - if you have a climbing hall near you, I can highly recommend this.

- Try building a social "net" that will catch you on the days you feel down and motivate you to keep on doing your activities. This helps me immensly, especially with exercising or sports.

- Think about getting a dog (or another pet). A dog will always motivate you to go outside and be there for you when you dont feel too good. If you are into pets, that is!

- Patients with "normal" depression are often told to reduce their sleeping hours to 5.5 - 6.5 per day. You should however consult a doctor before integrating this into your schedule. Consulting a doctor on this topic might be a good idea anyway. (In Germany, health insurance covers this - so I do not know if this is applicable to you.)

- Get some warm and weather-proof clothing (Thermo-pants, long underwear, fleece or softshell jacket). This makes going outside (and subsequently going anywhere) much more bearable.

- Think about "light therapy". Getting enough light in the morning can change your motivation for the day greatly.

Regardless of aforemnetioned ideas, I'd recommend on taking this issue to a psychiatrist. They are certainly more qualified to give advice than I am - and can, contrary to popular belief help you in more ways than just getting you medicated.